I think I made an impact

I had been hounding the sarkari departments on the basic question that "Who orders appointments of the senior most sarkari officer?". This had been going on for a good last six-seven months of April 2010 onwards. You know I had been updating all that in this blogsite also.

There's this chap called as Rajiv Kumar Mittal in the Department of Personnel and Training(DoPT) who replied to the question and was kind of getting pissed off by my repeated queries. He had in fact transferred the application to another department but got it returned by them.

Finally he had replied that there are two things I am basically asking for and not one.

He said that same person who orders is not the same as the one who appoints as I was assuming. I think he took me for a shareef fellow.

So next, in that case I modified the question slightly, and asked him to tell me "Who appoints the senior most sarkari officer?" This was somewhere in early August 2010.

I think Mittal-ji realised that I had hit the nail with the right question this time.

And he , I believe, pissed off again by these questions on Secretary level appointments issued a guideline to all an sundry. Nobody had ever asked such a basic question. The guidelines were issued on 13 Aug 2010 and is on the same topic that I have raised in my RTI queries, by the same person whom I asked, after the same date when I posted them with the second query.

The link to his published guidelines is here.

You might also notice that the Mittal fellow has even highlighted in bold the specific areas which were asked in the RTI application as mentioned in my earlier blogs.

Such a guideline was last issued in '96. I think a simple RTI query forced this department to mend the matters right after 14 years. They have to. In '96 they had made the rules as classified information. Now they cannot keep such rules as secret.

And in '96 I wasn't interested in this area and there was no internet either to do all this research.

I am coming for them in 2010 and I have my armory with me.

This was just the first impact. I promise more.